Many of you have met my spiritual Director…Msgr. Charles Elmer…the classic gentlemen msgr. He’s been a priest for 57 years now and is sought after as a Spiritual Advisor from Bishops to Priests to Seminarians. I can remember one day when I was in seminary asking him if he had it to do all over again…the priesthood…would he have done anything differently. I knew when I asked this question that Msgr. Elmer is filled with integrity…never misses his prayers…is always the first priest in church for daily mass. I fully expected him to have no regrets. To which Msgr. Elmer said…If I could do it all over again…I would be easier on people…I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy…with the Sacraments…with forgiveness. People have pain enough without me and the Church laying further burdens on them. He finished saying…I wish I would have given God’s mercy more freely. A pretty awesome insight on this Divine Mercy Sunday.

I have to admit I have never gone very deep into what the Divine Mercy Devotion actually is. In fact…and I’m ashamed to admit it…I thought it was just another pious devotion of people who sit in quiet churches starring off into the heavens in some sort of contrived ecstasy. I couldn’t have been more off base because I’ve taken the time now to learn about the Divine Mercy Devotion in the Catholic Church. Its message is simple…God loves us…all of us. And He wants us to recognize that his Mercy is greater than any sin we could ever commit. Because of this…He wants us to call upon him with complete Trust that his Mercy will naturally flow through us toward each other…making the world…and you and I along with it…Holy as he intended it. That’s it…that’s the Divine Mercy Devotion of our Church. If that could ever fully flower in our world…if we could ever as a society fully live feeling in our hearts that God truly loves us and that God desperately wants to forgive each one of us for our often times foolish behavior…the results would be overwhelming.

Here’s a little more of what I’ve learned about Divine Mercy. Divine Mercy is both a Spirituality and a Devotion which includes praying a chaplet…something like a rosary with repeated prayers calling for God’s Mercy upon us through his Passion Death and Resurrection. It comes to us from Sr. Faustina Kowalska…a Polish nun who lived in the first half of the last century. She was a mystic…and like so many mystics…Faustina’s life was beset by both physical calamities…dying at the age of 37 as well as Dark Nights of the Soul…moments in life where the only feeling recognizable was not the presence of God but rather the absence of God. She wrote a diary documenting all of the messages she received mystically from Jesus…all of which center on God’s eternal message of mercy. Jesus said it himself…I want mercy not sacrifice. In her Mystic conversations Jesus asked her to teach the world to pray what has come to be called the Divine Mercy Chaplet. He also asked her to paint an image of himself with beams of sunlight radiating out from his sacred heart…an image that is now very recognizable and you can probably find one in our book store. The Divine Mercy movement was made even more popular when Pope John Paul II consecrated the entire world to the Divine Mercy of God at the site of Sr. Faustina’s grave in 2002. Interestingly John Paul had written an Encyclical on God’s Divine Mercy back in 1980 and actually adopted the Divine Mercy of God as his theme throughout his pontificate. It has to be why that very first day when he stepped out on the Loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica as the newly elected Pope…something one really doesn’t rehearse for…he proclaimed his famous words…Do not be afraid…God Loves You!

Now whether or not praying the Divine Mercy chaplet is something you feel called to…quite honestly some people aren’t called to this style of prayer. I can’t imagine a Spirituality more appropriate for the human condition now or at any time in history. Because when you take away the beads of the chaplet…good things in their own right…when you dig just beneath the surface of the singing “For the Sake of his Sorrowful Passion”…something good in its own right…when you look beneath Faustina’s painting…something good in its own right…you come to the heart of Jesus...which is the most basic element of being a Christian…to live directly at the heart of Jesus. Think about Jesus’ ministry. One of the truly telling insights that Jesus gave us is that the Loving Mercy of God cannot not flow out to everyone. God’s Mercy and forgiveness is always free…undeserved…unconditional…universal in its embrace…reaching even beyond religion…beyond culture…beyond political party…even beyond Sin. The reason for this is that God is bigger than all of these things. God is bigger than anything this world can create…be it good or bad. That’s why when he first met the Apostles…to the absolute dismay of Peter…a good and law abiding Jew…he invited himself over to eat at Matthew’s house…a tax collector for the Romans who in doing so disconnected himself from his own Jewish culture and was seen as unclean. By the way…Jesus also sat and ate from the same dishes of Prostitutes…Lepers…and the rest of the unseemly people in the community. The Divine Mercy of God is extreme. His mercy on you and me knows no bounds…there’s no grave that can hold us…and it calls for extreme generosity of mercy from us to one another. Just today at St. Peter’s in his noon day Angelus the Holy Father Pope Benedict said it so clearly…he explained…We can only become true witnesses of the resurrection of our Lord when we allow the wonder of his love to shine through us…when, by our words and even more by our deeds consistent with the gospel, the voice and the hand of Jesus himself can be recognized. That’s Divine Mercy fully actualized.

I hope that I never regret…when I’m an old msgr…not offering God’s Mercy…unreservedly…indiscriminately…unabashedly to every person with whom I come into contact. You cannot give what you do not have. If you don’t know God’s mercy how will you ever be able to show mercy on each other? Let’s work on being more merciful to each other. It’s what God wants us to do.